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Automation is everywhere in today's business world. By programming software to complete tasks based on a series of "if-then" conditions, you can greatly increase the speed, efficiency and accuracy of processes like marketing and recruiting, freeing your team up to focus on bigger, more important strategy work.

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It may seem tempting to dive in head-first and automate everything you can, but it's wise to have a plan in place to make the best use of the time and resources required to implement automation. We asked 15 members of the ForbesTechnology Council to each share their best piece of advice for companies looking to automate more of their business processes.

1. Let Your Team Test And Implement Solutions

Find the best automation tool and assign a team in charge of testing and implementing it gradually. You'll see that the amount of resources you’ll be saving will be astonishing and that your collaborators will soon feel comfortable in adopting the new changes. - Nick Chandi, SlickPie

2. Fully Understand The Process You're Automating

I can't tell you how many times I've seen people try to automate an existing process without ever looking at the process itself. Take time to evaluate the process and, where necessary, change it, particularly in areas where automation can streamline it. - Lisbi Abraham, Andela

3. Help Your Team With Adopting Automation

Remember to help the team adopt the new automated processes. Perfectly designed automation will only work as well as it is adopted by the people who use it. Change is hard; most people don't like change, even if it will make their jobs and lives easier. So to make sure it's successful, remember to build in change management and training to any workflow automation you introduce. - Leah Allen, Radius

4. Plan Ahead For The Switch To Automation

Automation is a key to success in a lot of areas. However, when you're building a new product or an MVP, be careful about the number of things you automate. Often, it's more efficient to start fast, do things manually and then switch to automation when you understand the domain better. In the end, you’re still going to have to wire everything up, so be ready! - Andrey Neverov, Trucker Path

5. Calculate The ROI Of Automation

Automation isn't always easy. Make sure to estimate the time/cost savings that automating a process will give and compare to the time/cost it will take to actually automate that process. If you invest the time/money now, is the amount of time it takes to recoup that investment acceptable? Make sure to prioritize automating the processes that will save the most time and have the biggest ROI. - Matthew Kolb, AnyplaceAmerica.com

6. Think Long Term

When automating, consider what will make the most sense in the long run. Make sure that whatever solution you employ has the flexibility to grow and adapt to future changes in your development process. The worst thing is becoming dependent on a solution you have limited or no control over -- an issue many cloud-based systems and third-party apps are known for. - Chris Kirby, Voices.com

Complex workflows can have multiple divergent critical paths. When you use task dependencies and logic-based deviation, you can easily create a workflow that is not user-friendly. To avoid this, allow larger blocks of tasks to be triggered at any given time. This will give users enough wiggle room to make the automated workflow work for them. - Dan Pennell, WMtek

8. Work Backward From Your Ideal Workflow

Far too many automation projects get blown out of proportion and go over budget. It's important to set a clear vision of what the end state of the automation will look and behave like and then work backward in defining the phases of delivery needed to address it. This makes it difficult for the project to fall by the wayside and sets clear expectations for all involved upfront. - Bijan Vaez, EventMobi

9. Consider The Security Risks Of Automation

What is automated and digitized can be hacked. Automation makes tasks one click easier and a thousand times faster for you -- it also does the same for the malicious attacker. Be mindful of security and plan accordingly. - Satyam Tyagi, Certes Networks

10. Seek Ready-Made Solutions

When you want to automate a process, research what’s available before you decide to build your own. Using what’s already available will save you time and money. And in business, time is money, so you need to move fast. Leverage as many ready-made solutions as you can, connect them together and test that they work. - Lubo Smid, STRV

11. Go Slow And Prioritize

Automating workflow takes a lot of upfront time and resources, both of which you’ll recover exponentially if you do it right. There’s also a steep learning curve involved, so start by creating a list of what measures will have the largest impact on the company and then prioritize by how much work/effort/risk is involved in implementing each. - Or Shani, Adgorithms, creators of Albert

12. Write Down Your Processes

Before you automate your workflow, you should document all of your processes and go through them with a fine-tooth comb. In this step, you’re looking for edge cases -- problems that occur when something operates at an extreme parameter and will derail your systems when you automate. - Pin Chen, ONTRAPORT

13. Keep High Quality Control Standards

Automation, like any computer system, will have bugs. Sometimes these bugs are obvious oversights, and other times they are “corner cases” resulting from unlikely boundary conditions. You must subject your automation procedures to the same degree of quality control that you would do for your product development. Once your automation project is deployed, monitor and measure its effectiveness to ensure it works as expected. - Arvind Prabhakar, StreamSets

14. Start Off Simple

Automation is a bit like digging a tunnel: You don't know what you're going to run into. It's best to begin with something useful but simple. You'll avoid wasted time and resources but learn a lot about your organization and infrastructure. Carry those lessons forward, taking an incremental approach, and you'll maximize your productivity gains while preparing yourself for bigger projects. - Matthew Russell, Digital Reasoning

15. Use Automation To Solve Specific Problems

It’s easy to develop the tech first and find applications later, but this can be a fool’s errand. For instance, at Endgame, we recognized that sifting through queries took analysts too long. So we built and released Artemis, a chatbot assistant to automate analysts’ data workflows into conversation-style queries, which frees them up to immediately stop suspicious activity from that pulled data. - Jamie Butler, Endgame

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of elite CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Find out if you qualify at forbestechcouncil.com. Questions about an article? Email